This article uses a mid-century text to reengage a late-1970s concept to answer a new century question. The authors return to Alvin Gouldner's classic (1954) study Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy to reexamine the "coupling" concept in contemporary institutionalism in a way that engages the following question: How do new institutional forms emerge? Based on Gouldner's detailed observations of work in a gypsum mine, the authors argue that coupling processes are key mechanisms in the emergence of institutional forms. Examining coupling as a dynamic process and activity helps us to understand how the institution of bureaucracy emerged in the gypsum mine and interacted with previous social orders of authority and control. Gouldner's account of coupling at the mine is a story of formal and informal power struggles and active conflict over meaning, bringing the process of local institutional formation into sharp relief.

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Over the past 10 years the sales of Fair Trade goods – particularly those carrying the Fair Trade Labelling Organizations International (FLO) certification mark – have grown exponentially. Academic interest in Fair Trade has also grown significantly over the past decade with researchers analysing the model from a wide range of theoretical perspectives. Whilst Fair Trade is generally acknowledged as a new supply chain model, it has tended to be studied at the micro/organisational level rather than at the macro/systems level. As a consequence, its wider impact as institutional innovation at the field level appears to have been under-theorised so far. In order to address this research gap, this article uses a neo- institutionalist perspective to analyse Fair Trade not simply as a new exchange model working within existing organisational and economic structures, but rather as an agent of institutional entrepreneurship at, and beyond, the field level. From this latter perspective, Fair Trade brings a new set of transformational meanings to extant exchange and consumption models and reforms fields of economic exchange by disrupting and then re-assembling key institutional elements around modern consumption to roll back commodity fetishism and reconnect consumers and producers. The type of institutional change driven by Fair Trade can be seen as a form of social entrepreneurship.

Across the world, a new landscape of social investment has been developing rapidly over the last 10–15 years, yet there has not been an academic study of the phenomenon to date. This paper aims to address this important gap in social entrepreneurship research with new empirical and theoretical work. Theoretically, the paper takes an interpretive approach drawing on institutional theory and other work on the sociology of markets to conceptualize social investment as a socially constructed space within which different investment logics and investor rationalities are currently in play. Using a Weberian analytic lens this paper identifies two ideal type investor rationalities (zweckrational; wertrational) that drive different institutional forms of social investment but also suggests that a third – systemic – rationality can be discerned that combines aspects of both in practice. This analysis suggests a three-part typology of social investment organized according to investor rationality that, in turn, generates a Social Investment Matrix consisting of nine distinct models. Empirically, this paper presents – for the first time – an attempt to quantify the flows of capital within the inchoate social investment landscape. The paper concludes by setting out three possible future scenarios for social investment each representing the ultimate dominance of a singular investor rationality.